Dante’s Lucy in the Canon Law of ConsentGrace Delmolino

Before I get to Lucy, the spirit of this volume moves me to record my profound intellectual and personal debt to The Undivine Comedy. At its core, this is a hymn to Teodolinda Barolini as a teacher who immerses us in the gran mar of the Commedia’s poetic, historical, theological, legal, and ethical depths, all of which flow from a reading of the poem in its entirety.

My first encounter with The Undivine Comedy was not as a scholar reading a ground-breaking work fresh off the presses, since I was three months old when the book came out. I read The Undivine Comedy two decades later, as a grad student taking Teo’s Dante course at Columbia in 2012.11The yearlong course is now available online as The Dante Course, Digital Dante, 2015–2016 <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/the-dante-course> [accessed 2 June 2025]. That chapter is still fresh in the book of my memory. I am in the second year of my PhD. The Dante class meets for two hours, twice a week — double the meeting time of a regular grad seminar — for a Beginning of page[p. 184] full academic year. We read two cantos every class. I take advantage of a long break to prepare the reading beforehand; I get the $10 lunch special at a now-defunct sushi place directly across from Columbia’s Morningside gate and linger there every Tuesday and Thursday to spend several hours with Dante. By mid-year, the servers know my order and start bringing me a hot green tea as soon as they see me sit down. In the lecture hall, Professor Barolini speaks directly from her densely annotated, rebound copy of the text, explaining Dante’s poetry with the sparkling precision of Beatrice delivering her infallibile avviso in Paradiso 7 (a Beatrice dressed in pearls and enviably fashionable jackets). My experience of that class — truly a course in how to read, tested regularly by translations on demand in front of my classmates — is inextricably bound up in the other defining experience of my life that year, one of enormous personal loss after the death of my brother. What I remember most from studying the Commedia is not some sharp moment of insight into the nature of grief. It is the simple consolation of walking along the path of the text each day: two cantos per class, two classes per week, two semesters to reach 100 cantos, punctuated only by the absolute wringer that is the bluebook final exam.

To create a year-long course by close reading a single text is both a deeply medieval and a deeply radical pedagogy. In an age of shortening attention spans, few readers today ever have the opportunity to sit so long with a text. Few texts and few teachers can sustain that depth. Like her Dante course, Teodolinda Barolini’s Undivine Comedy teaches a methodology of reading the poem as what it actually is, which is not so simple a process when its author is a sublime manipulator of our response to the text. The book and the course both yield a cornucopia of hermeneutic fruits. The root from which they grow is an uncompromising commitment to that process of clear-eyed reading. I present the pages that follow here in tribute to The Undivine Comedy as the unsurpassed methodological guidebook of Dante studies, and in honour of the many years of friendship and intellectual dialogue that came into my life because of that book and its author.Beginning of page[p. 185]

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Reading the Commedia requires analysing the poem’s narratological features, contextualizing it with history and theology and law and lyric, and seeing past what commentators have repeated for centuries without critical reflection. In the present chapter, I follow the path laid out in The Undivine Comedy and its sister essay ‘“Only Historicize”’:22Teodolinda Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies’, Dante Studies, 127 (2009), pp. 37–54. the path of detheologizing and historicizing, which is also the path of retheologizing. Dante studies needs a new and better theology — or rather, it needs a theology grounded in history. We must detheologize so that we do not read the Commedia uncritically as an instruction manual on how souls get placed into hell, and then we must retheologize by looking to actual theology to see how Dante intervenes — sometimes quite radically — in the ethical and philosophical questions that make up so much of medieval Christian thought. Consent is one such question. Consent sits at the intersection of theology and the law, for it is both a moral and a legal issue, with practical implications in the courts and eschatological implications in the afterlife. Lucia (St. Lucy) is a bridge from the Commedia, where she appears as a character, to the theological jurisprudence of consent in the Middle Ages, where she appears, well before Dante’s poem was ever written, as a conceptual cornerstone for the treatment of rape, consent, and free will.

Dante’s Lucia is an enigmatic figure in the Divine Comedy. Her structural position in the poem suggests that she is important: she appears three times, once in each canticle (Inferno 2, Purgatorio 9, Paradiso 32), at moments of threshold and transition along Dante’s journey. But the standard glosses on Lucia are banal. Among early commentators, the Ottimo and Benvenuto da Imola allegorized Lucia as divine grace; modern commentaries generally give some version of this reading and few dwell further on Lucia.33The Ottimo and Benvenuto draw on Augustine to designate Lucia’s role as gratia cooperans, moved by the gratia operans of the first ‘donna’ in Inferno 2’s chain of grace. Other early commentaries had different (though similarly generic) allegories: Lucy as Prudence (Anonimo Selmiano), Lucy as ‘uno intelletto profondo di divinità’ (Jacopo della Lana), or Lucy as ‘la divina clemenza, la divina misericordia, la divina benignità’ (Boccaccio). L’Ottimo Commento (1333), glosses to Inf. 1 nota and Purg. 9.52; Benvenuto da Imola (1375–80), gloss to Inf. 2.94–96; Anonimo Selmiano (1337[?]), gloss to Inf. 2.102; Jacopo della Lana (1324–28), gloss to Inf. 2.97–99; Giovanni Boccaccio (1373–75), allegorical gloss to Inf. 2.52–120. I cite all commentaries from the Dartmouth Dante Project, 2025 <https://dante.dartmouth.edu/> [accessed 2 June 2025]. Some have proposed that Lucia Beginning of page[p. 186](whose name means ‘light’ from lux and whose iconography involves eyes) was Dante’s personal saint because of the ophthalmological strain Dante once experienced, as recounted in Convivio 3.9.15.44Many moderns attribute this connection between Lucia and Dante’s eye troubles to Jacopo Alighieri, but I have not yet found a source who directly quotes what Jacopo said, nor can I turn up a relevant gloss in his commentary on Inferno. Graziolo in 1324 claims that Dante had a particular devotion to Lucia but does not connect this to Dante’s eyesight: ‘beata Lucia, in qua ipse Dantes in tempore vite sue habuit maximam devotionem, venit ad locum felicem in quo residebat ipsa domina Beatrisia’ (gloss to Inf. 2.76–102). The relevant passage in the Convivio is: ‘E io fui esperto di questo l’anno medesimo che nacque questa canzone, che per affaticare lo viso molto a studio di leggere, in tanto debilitai li spiriti visivi che le stelle mi pareano tutte d’alcuno albore ombrate. E per lunga riposanza in luoghi oscuri e freddi, e con affreddare lo corpo dell’occhio coll’acqua chiara, riunì sì la vertù disgregata che tornai nel primo buono stato della vista’ (‘And I experienced this in the same year in which I wrote this canzone, for by greatly straining my eyes through studious reading I weakened my vision so much that the stars seemed shrouded by a white haze. But by resting in dark, cool places and by cooling my eyes with clear water, I regained that deteriorated power and I returned to my earlier state of good vision’; Convivio 3.9.15). All quotes from Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. by Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). Translations mine. Giorgio Padoan dismisses the Convivio reference as ‘dato pressoché inutile in questo contesto’ (Padoan 1967, gloss to Inf. 2.98). See also Rachel Jacoff and William A. Stephany, Lectura Dantis Americana: Inferno ii (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 30–31. Neither gloss gives much purchase on the passages where Lucia appears and the allegory strips Lucia of all specificity: any Christian saint might have equally well represented divine grace. This essay considers Saint Lucy beyond the pages of Dante’s poem, moving through the saint’s recorded legend and its use in Gratian’s Decretum to contextualize Dante’s mysterious Lucia.

Very few Dante commentators note that across medieval Latin versions of St. Lucy’s life, including the Golden Legend and the Speculum Historiale that were widely read in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the distinctive feature of Lucy’s martyrdom is her physical resistance to gang rape and her verbal defence of the power of consent. In Gratian’s Decretum, the foundational textbook of canon law completed around 1140 and still in vigorous use in Dante’s time, Lucy is the first example cited in Gratian’s analysis of rape.55Dec. C. 32 q. 5. I cite the text from Gratian, Decretum, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by Emil Friedberg, 2 vols (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879–81; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959), i. Citations from the Ordinary Gloss are from the digitized version of the sixteenth-century Editio Romana available through UCLA under the directorship of Henry Ansgar Kelly: UCLA Digital Library Program, Corpus juris canonici emendatum et notis illustratum, 4 vols (Rome: Gregory XIII, 1582) <https://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw/> [accessed 2 June 2025]. Translations of Gratian and the glosses are mine. The term Gratian uses for Beginning of page[p. 187] rape is vis or ‘violence’, meaning sexual violation without the victim’s consent, and for canon law the topic of rape becomes a broader ethical inquiry into the nature of violence, sin, guilt, and consent. Those topics have obvious weight for Dante, too. As Barolini notes, he treats the interplay of will and consent in the Commedia most prominently in Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3–4, a set of cantos tightly connected by the adaptation of Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 on voluntary and involuntary action (Aristotelian categories that the later canonists also applied to Gratian’s quaestio on vis).66Teodolinda Barolini first observed in 1998 that Dante adapts Aristotle’s example of a wind that carries a man away (involuntary action) into the whirlwind of the lustful (voluntary action falsely conceived of as involuntary action). Aristotle’s other example, of someone being carried away ‘by men who had him in their power’, is reworked in Paradiso 3–4 with Piccarda and Constance. Barolini’s more recent essay examines how closely Dante works with his source in Aristotle and yet how profoundly Aristotle’s ethics are disrupted by Dante’s introduction of Christian free will. That second example bears on the case of Saint Lucy as well, who is not carried off by the men who attempt to take her. Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in its Lyric and Autobiographical Context’, in Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 70–101 (pp. 74–75); Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Aristotle on Voluntary and Involuntary Action: Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 in Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3–5’, Textual Cultures, 16.2 (2023), pp. 247–74 <https://doi.org/10.14434/tc.v16i2.36773>. In the Decretum, Lucy is a legal example for the same conceptual issues Dante treats in Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3–4. But when Dante places Lucia in his poem, he divorces her from any explicit discussion of violence and consent, even though these are precisely the issues she brought up for the canonist Gratian, the theologian Aquinas, the hagiographer Jacobus de Voragine, the preacher Fra Giordano, and, in all probability, any medieval reader who possessed even a passing familiarity with her passion.77I will treat the first three of these thinkers directly in this essay; for analysis of Fra Giordano that provides important context for popular knowledge of Lucy in Dante’s time and confirms that these features of her martyrdom were readily known, see Silvio Pasquazi, ‘Il canto ii dell’Inferno’, in Inferno: letture degli anni 1973–1976, ed. by Silvio Zennaro (Rome: Bonacci, 1977), pp. 35–65.

Lucia’s three appearances in the Commedia mark threshold moments in Dante’s journey. Inferno 2 prepares Dante to enter the underworld (which he does in Inferno 3), Purgatorio 9 prepares Dante to Beginning of page[p. 188] enter purgatory proper (which he does in Purgatorio 10), and Paradiso 32 concludes the Commedia’s formula of soul-introduced-to-Dante-by-guide and finally prepares Dante to gaze upon the vision of God (which he does in Paradiso 33). Each time she appears at a moment of threat or uncertainty or potential transgression in Dante’s journey along the straight path. Her role is mediator and conduit. Her characterization is feminine and lyric: she is one of ‘tre donne benedette’ (‘three blessed ladies’; Inf. 2.124) who care for Dante in the court of heaven; she appears amidst flowers (Purg. 9.54); she has beautiful eyes (Purg. 9.62); she is the mover of Beatrice (‘Lucia, che mosse la tua donna’, ‘Lucia, who moved your lady’; Par. 32.137).88Quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82), with some alterations to emphasize literal readings. Had Dante not named this lady as ‘Lucia’ in each of these three cantos, no one would ever have been able to identify her as Saint Lucy. But Dante insists on her name. That name can lead us to Lucy’s textual history before Dante’s poem, where we find not a generic allegory of grace, but the story of a woman saint whose words on the power of consent became a keystone for the treatment of rape in medieval Christian law and theology.

In Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), one of the most popular hagiographical collections of the Middle Ages, Saint Lucy is an emblem of rectitude. Her name, etymologically linked to the Latin lux (light), expresses constancy and straightness:

Habet etiam diffusionem sine coinquinatione, quia per quaecunque immunda diffusa non coinquinatur; rectum incessum sine curvitate, longissimam lineam pertransit sine morosa dilatione. Per hoc ostenditur, quod beata virgo Lucia habuit decorem virginitatis sine aliqua corruptione, diffusionem caritatis sine aliquo immundo amore, rectum incessum intensionis in Deum sine aliqua obliquitate, longissimam lineam divinae operationis sine negligentiae tarditate. Vel Lucia dicitur quasi lucis via.

(Light also has radiation without contamination, because no matter how unclean may be the places where it radiates, it is Beginning of page[p. 189] not contaminated; it goes in straight lines, without curvature, and traverses the greatest distances without losing its speed. Thus we are shown that the blessed virgin Lucy possessed the beauty of virginity without trace of corruption; that she radiated charity without any impure love; her progress toward God was straight and without deviation, and went far in God’s works without negligence or delay. Or the name is interpreted ‘way of light’.) (Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’)99I cite the Latin from Jacobi A Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by Johann Georg Theodor Graesse (Vratislavia: Koebner, 1890). Translations, sometimes modified for literalism, are from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

In general terms, the association of light-love-motion from the Legenda aurea fits neatly with Inferno 2’s intertwining of love and movement (‘amor mi mosse’, ‘love moved me’; Inf. 2.72) and Lucy’s opposition to negligence (‘sine negligentiae tarditate’) also fits with her role in transitioning Dante out of the late repentant in Purgatorio 9. More importantly, though, the abstract qualities represented by her name take tangible form in the account of her life. Most Dante commentaries gloss her as a fourth-century Syracusan martyr; very few indicate that there is anything more to her story.1010Edward Moore, in an essay dedicated entirely to Lucia, does not go into any detail about her legend other than to note briefly that she is ‘the Syracusan martyr Lucia who suffered under Diocletian c. 300’ (Edward Moore, ‘Sta. Lucia in the Divina Commedia’, in Moore, Studies in Dante, Fourth Series: Textual Criticism of the ‘Convivio’ and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Haskell House, 1917; repr. 1968), pp. 235–55 (p. 245)). This is typical: the term ‘rape’ never appears in commentaries on Dante’s Lucia and only rarely in the scholarship. The entry on ‘Lucia, santa’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca is very short and uses Dante’s text to confirm Graziolo’s 1324 gloss on Dante’s devotion to Lucia: ‘La devozione di D. per la santa è attestata dal figlio Iacopo e da Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli […] notizia confermata dallo stesso poeta che si dichiara fedele, cioè devoto di L.’ (Agostino Amore, ‘Lucia, santa’, in Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. by Umberto Bosco (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 1970)<https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/santa-lucia_(Enciclopedia-Dantesca)/> [accessed 2 June 2025].

Accounts of Saint Lucy’s life tell that she vows her virginity to God, angering the man she was supposed to marry, and her jilted groom reports her as a Christian to the consul Paschasius.1111For close reading and plot summary of Lucy’s passion, this essay uses the thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, a wildly popular hagiographical collection and a source available to Dante. Another popular source of saints’ lives, the thirteenth-century Speculum Historiale, contains a very similar story of Lucy (14.2–3). Paschasius taunts her repeatedly, to which she responds each time in defence of herself Beginning of page[p. 190] and God. Then, in an episode that is undoubtedly the highlight of her legend, Paschasius orders her dragged to a brothel so that she will be raped until the Holy Spirit leaves her:

Paschasius dixit: ‘cessabunt verba, cum perventum fuerit ad verbera.’ Cui Lucia dixit: ‘verba Dei cessare non possunt.’ Cui Paschasius: ‘tu ergo Deus es?’ Respondit Lucia: ‘ancilla Dei sum, qui dixit: “cum steteritis ante reges et praesides etc. Non enim vos estis etc.”’ Paschasius dixit: ‘in te ergo spiritus sanctus est?’ Cui Lucia: ‘qui caste vivunt, templum spiritus sancti sunt.’ Cui Paschasius: ‘ego faciam te duci ad lupanar, ut ibi violationem accipias et spiritum sanctum perdas.’

(Paschasius said: ‘The sting of the whip will silence your lip!’ To which Lucy said: ‘The words of God cannot be stilled!’ Paschasius: ‘So you are God?’ Lucy: ‘I am the handmaid of God, who said to his disciples, “You shall be brought before governors and before kings for my sake, but when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to say, for it is not you that speak but the Holy Spirit that speaks in you.”’ Paschasius: ‘So the Holy Spirit is in you?’ Lucy: ‘Those who live chaste lives are the temples of the Holy Spirit.’ ‘Then I shall have you taken to a brothel’, said Paschasius, ‘your body will be defiled and you will lose the Holy Spirit.’) (Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’)

Paschasius threatens Lucy with sexual violence as a challenge to her faith and commitment to chastity. The consul sees chastity and virtue as features of the body, which can be taken away by forcible sex and the violence of men, but Lucy asserts that chastity belongs to the mind and therefore cannot be touched so long as she refuses to give her consent: ‘non inquinatur corpus nisi de consensu mentis, nam si me invitam violari feceris, castitas mihi duplicabitur ad coronam. Nunquam autem voluntatem meam ad consensum poteris provocare’ (‘The body is not defiled unless by the consent of the mind, so if you have me violated against my will, my chastity will be doubled to my crown. Nor will you ever be able to provoke my will into consent’; Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’). When Paschasius brings in a crowd to carry Lucy off, the Holy Spirit fixes her so firmly in place that the men are unable to move her body. A thousand men, a thousand oxen, magicians, urine, fire, boiling oil — none can budge her. She continues speaking even after being stabbed in the throat and dies only Beginning of page[p. 191] once priests administer last rites. Lucy’s forceful speech, and especially her words on consent, are the standout feature of her martyrdom.

The historical context of Saint Lucy — by which I mean that these accounts were historically available to Dante, not that they are true histories — shows a Lucy who embodies constancy and fortitude, demonstrated by actions and words as reported in her hagiography and her existence as a specific woman.1212Others have noted that the three blessed ladies of Inferno 2, unlike the three beasts of Inferno 1, have some kind of indisputable historical dimensionality. See Moore, ‘Sta. Lucia’, p. 241; and Pasquazi, ‘Il canto II dell’Inferno’, p. 41: ‘queste donne sono anzitutto reali […] Dante le assume come soggetto di poesia, perché le ama e le venera nella loro realtà, e ama e venera in esse quei valori che esse portano e manifestano’. Like Beatrice, she cannot be reduced to only an allegory of her abstract qualities; she represents those qualities yet also maintains a reality and a historicity, because she existed beyond Dante’s text. Silvio Pasquazi, in a 1977 lectura examining Fra Giordano’s sermons on Lucy, argues that these qualities of fortitude and resistance would have been very familiar to a medieval audience.1313‘Dalle prediche di fra Giordano e dalla Passio risulta concordemente che per Dante come per i suoi contemporanei il carattere specifico di Santa Lucia fu la fermezza e costanza nel volere il bene e nell’attuarlo con tutte le forze, e la corrispondente inflessibile resistenza contro ogni male’ (Pasquazi, ‘Il canto II dell’Inferno’, pp. 48–49). Building on Pasquazi, Rachel Jacoff and William Stephany made the case in 1989 that Dante chose Lucia specifically because of her inflexible will, writing:

The antiphon of the mass said on her day makes it her central attribute: ‘Columna es immobilis, Lucia, sponsa Christi’ [‘You are a pillar immovable, Lucy, bride of Christ’]. Her martyrdom testifies to the qualities Dante praises in the first sphere in the Paradiso when the difference between the absolute and the conditional will is clarified by Beatrice’s discourse […] Although Lucy’s ‘salda voglia’ is the central feature of her legend, no commentator before Pasquazi so much as mentions it.1414Jacoff and Stephany, Inferno II, pp. 33–34.

I wish here to consider what it means that Lucy’s fortitude derives its power from the specific threat of rape: that is, violence.1515To the extent that scholars and commentators have picked up on the readings advanced by Pasquazi and Jacoff and Stephany, it is usually to add ‘fortitude’ to the allegorical inventory of Lucia’s significance, erasing the concrete details and textual history from which they extract only that general quality of fortitude. See, for example, Anthony K. Cassell, ‘Santa Lucia as Patroness of Sight: Hagiography, Iconography, and Dante’, Dante Studies, 109 (1991), pp. 71–88 (p. 72). Robert Hollander, in his commentary to Purgatorio 9.55, cites Pasquazi and Jacoff and Stephany while summing up their contributions as an attempt ‘to restore the importance of the cardinal virtue fortitude in Dante’s fashioning of the meaning of Saint Lucy. The Latin words of her legend are explicit. In the Legenda aurea Paschasius first Beginning of page[p. 192] threatens to have her sexually violated (‘ego faciam te duci ad lupanar, ut ibi violationem accipias et spiritum sanctum perdas’, ‘I will have you dragged to the brothel, so that you will be violated and lose the Holy Spirit’) and then commands pimps (lenones) to have a crowd of men rape her to death (‘invitate ad eam omnem populam et tamdiu illudatur, donec mortua nuntietur’, ‘invite the whole crowd to her and let them take their pleasure from her until she is dead’; Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’). Gratian, the ‘father of canon law’, uses Lucy’s words to illustrate the force of consent in his legal analysis, drawing on the powerful story of her attempted and thwarted rape. Aquinas brings up St. Lucy in the Summa Theologiae when exploring the possibility of a martyrdom based on the violence of rape alone, without death (a possibility ultimately rejected insofar as ‘it is not evident to men whether [a woman] suffers this for love of the Christian faith, or rather through contempt of chastity’, though this hypothetical type of martyrdom is still conceivable ‘on the sight of God, who searcheth the heart’; ST 2 2ae q. 124 a. 4, reply to objection 2).1616English translation of the Summa Theologiae from Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. edn (London: Washbourne, 1920). For these two influential Christian thinkers, Lucy is indelibly linked to the issues of violence and consent. These concepts raise ethical questions with far-reaching implications for the Christian doctrine of sin and free will, and they are treated in the particular context of rape law.

Lucy’s powerful defence of her will is the first example Gratian cites in C. 32 q. 5 of the Decretum. Causa 32 is in the section of the Decretum that deals with marriage; the causa has eight questions that cover adultery, sexual issues, and marital separation. Question 5 picks up a portion of the main case narrative in which a certain man ‘quemdam rogavit, ut vi uxorem opprimeret suam, ut sic eam dimittere posset’ (‘asked another to assault his wife by force so that he could dismiss her’). The question hones in on the issue of culpability in rape, asking ‘si ea, quae vim patitur, pudicitiam amittere comprobetur?’Beginning of page[p. 193] (‘whether a woman who has suffered violence can be judged to have given up her chastity?’).

To understand this question, we must understand how medieval law understood ‘rape’.1717Many critical treatments of ‘rape in medieval law’ become muddled by mistranslations and misunderstandings of raptus, a medieval term which is the etymological root of the word ‘rape’. Raptus is legally defined as a crime of abduction, not a crime of forced coitus; the two may have frequently gone together in practice but they are still separate concepts in medieval law. The medieval term that best corresponds to what we mean today by ‘rape’ is vis or per vim stuprum. Those are the concepts that Gratian explores in C. 32 q. 5, while he treats raptus elsewhere in the Decretum. Atria Larson analyzes the common scholarly confusion between raptus and vis in order to argue that not only did medieval canon law treat rape as a serious offense, an author like Gratian might even be considered progressive in the emphasis he places on women’s consent (Atria Larson, ‘Lucretia (and Lucia) and the Medieval Canonists: Guilt, Consent, and Chastity in the Early Canonistic Jurisprudence of Rape’, Law and History Review (2025, forthcoming)). Modern treatments of sexual consent juxtapose ‘rape’ and ‘sex’, where rape happens without consent and is therefore a crime while sex happens with consent and is therefore legally/ethically permissible. The medieval canonistic paradigm, by contrast, uses consent to theorize sex outside of marriage as an act that can be either criminal and blameworthy if done with consent (various forms of lust and illicit sex), or criminal on the part of the perpetrator but blame-free on the part of the victim if done without consent (vis).1818The conception of lust as consensually immoral sex is a specific manifestation of the broader Christian doctrine of free will. Gregory the Great writes, in a passage that presages the contrapasso of Inferno 5: ‘And we “shut the doors”, when we restrain forbidden lusts; and so whereas our consent set open these doors of carnal concupiscence, it forced us to the countless evils of our corrupt state. And so now we henceforth groan under the weight of mortality, though we came thereunto by our own free will, in that the justice of the sentence against us requires thus much, that what we have done willingly, we should bear with against our will’ (Moralia in Job, 4.26.47). English translation from Gregory the Great, The Book of the Morals of St. Gregory the Pope, or an Exposition on the Book of Blessed Job, trans. and ed. by John Henry Parker, 3 vols (London: Rivington, 1844). Gregory is an important author in Dec. C. 32 q. 5, providing c. 13 in that quaestio as well as De pen. D. 2 c. 23, which the Ordinary Gloss attaches to C. 32’s discussion of culpability via wilful self-subjugation to sensual desire (see below). Whereas the presence of consent during sex today usually transforms that sex into a moral good, medieval canon law calls attention to positive sexual consent in order to designate the sex as criminal and sinful, as in the crimes of fornicatio and stuprum. The progressive power of medieval consent lies in its refusal, in its capacity to protect the rape victim from accusations of lust and immorality.Beginning of page[p. 194]

In response to the question of whether a woman bears any guilt for committing the sin of lust if she has been raped, Gratian answers clearly in the negative, citing Lucy in his preliminary comments:

Quod autem pudicitia uiolenter eripi non possit, multorum auctoritatibus probatur. Est enim uirtus animi, que uiolentiam non sentit. Corpori namque uis infertur, non animo. Unde, quamuis corpus uiolenter corrumpatur si pudicitia mentis seruetur illesa, tamen castitas duplicatur. Sicut B. Lucia fertur dixisse Pascasio. ‘Si inuitam me feceris uiolari, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam’. De sensibus enim et uoluntatibus iudicat Deus.

(Many authorities prove that chastity cannot be snatched away by violence. For it is a virtue of the mind, which does not feel violence. Violence is done to the body, not to the mind. Thus, if untainted chastity of the mind is observed even while the body is violently corrupted, chastity is even doubled. Thus Saint Lucy is to have said to Paschasius: ‘If you will have me violated against my will, my chastity will be doubled to my crown’. For God judges according to senses and wills.) (Dec. C. 32 q. 5 d.a.c. 1)1919Friedberg, in his edition of the Decretum, ends the quotation of direct discourse from Lucy before the final sentence of this dictum. That line on ‘de sensibus et voluntatibus’ does not appear in the Legenda aurea or Speculum historiale but does show up in Ado of Vienne’s Martyrology and other earlier sources available to Gratian. On Gratian’s sources in composing C. 32 q. 5, see Atria Larson, ‘A Note on a Hagiographical Source for Gratian’s Decretum: The Quotation Attributed to St. Lucy in C. 32 q. 5’, Traditio (2025, forthcoming).

Question 5 affirms the idea, articulated by Lucy herself in her vita, that ‘nunquam coinquinatur corpus nisi de consensu mentis’ (‘the body is not polluted except by consent of the mind’; Legenda Aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’). A woman who has been raped without her consent has not given up anything of her chastity; she is not guilty of lust. In C. 32 q. 5, Gratian calls together many Christian authorities to support Lucy’s assertion, as a few of the rubrics illustrate: ‘Melior est uirginitas mentis quam carnis’ (‘Virginity of the mind is better than virginity of the flesh’; c. 1); ‘In corpore pudicitia uiolari non potest, si mens inuiolata seruetur’ (‘Chastity cannot be violated in the body if the mind remains unviolated’; c. 7); ‘Nec peccatum, nec iusticia opere sine uoluntate perficitur’ (‘Neither sin nor works of justice are done Beginning of page[p. 195] without the will’; c. 10). It is not the status of the body (inflected by physical violence) that determines culpability, but the status of the mind (inflected by consent).

Later decretists and commentators would develop the scholastic distinctions of conditional and absolute will around this case, but those distinctions postdate Gratian.2020The decretists’ focus on conditional and absolute will in their commentary on Gratian illustrates the importance of Lucy’s case to the broader canonistic analysis of consent and the will. See Larson, ‘Lucretia (and Lucia) and the Medieval Canonists’; Wolfgang P. Müller, ‘Lucretia and the Medieval Canonists’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 19 (1989), pp. 13–32. And for Lucy, the distinctions do not matter, because she is an unambiguous example of absolute will by any interpretation: her will is so strong that she is not raped or indeed moved at all. She is famously immobile, fixed by the Holy Spirit. In her words, however, she asserts that even if her body had been moved — that is, if she had actually been dragged off and raped — the violation of her body would not matter theologically or eschatologically, for it is the consent of the will that guards the psychological threshold between blameless vis (experienced as object) and culpable luxuria (perpetrated as subject). Lucy verbally anticipates that a ‘double crown’ will await her in the afterlife even if the thousand men do succeed carrying her off. Her future indicative verb claims that eschatological honour not just for her hypothetical future self, but also implicitly for imagined women who will actually be raped in times to come: ‘castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam’.

Gratian’s emphasis on consent in C. 32 q. 5 allows for the possibility that a woman can be physically violated and yet possess a ‘virginity of the mind’ or ‘chastity of the mind’, as well as the possibility that she may be physically pudica and yet be guilty of sinful mental concupiscence (Dec. C. 32 q. 5 c. 12). Dante takes a similar approach when treating lust in Inferno 5: he makes the atypical choice to focus on the mental ethics of desire rather than the physical torture of the lustful. This is a highly unusual move for vision literature, as Barolini has laid out in detail, but it is a more familiar move for canon law, where the legal analysis of lust is an exploration of will and consent.2121Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, pp. 70–75; Barolini, ‘Dante’s Sympathy for the Other’, in Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2022), pp. 22–34.Beginning of page[p. 196]

Canon law provides what I believe is the earliest known source for the verse that Dante uses to define lust in Inferno 5: ‘i peccator carnali, | che la ragion sommettono al talento’ (‘the carnal sinners, | who subject reason to the rule of lust’; Inf. 5.38–39). The same expression appears in canon law, in Latin, in the ordinary gloss to the same question of the Decretum where St. Lucy expresses the power of her consent. A canon from Isidore states: ‘Non potest corpus corrumpi, nisi prius animus corruptus fuerit. Munda namque a contagione animi caro non peccat’ (‘The body cannot be corrupted, unless the mind is corrupted first. The flesh does not sin when the mind is free of contamination’; Dec. C. 32 q 5 c 8). The ordinary gloss to this text anticipates Dante’s ‘la ragion sommettono al talento’ (‘they subject reason to the rule of lust’): ‘Nam tunc homo peccat cum mens per delectationem subiugatur’ (‘man sins when the mind is made subject to desire’; Ordinary Gloss to Dec. C. 32 q. 5 c. 8).

This statement, while perhaps conventional in a Christian analysis of sin, is notable because it uses the same distinct syntax that would later worm its way into Italian vernacular poetry. Dante commentators have already assembled a collection of vernacular citations expressing the idea of ‘subordinating reason to desire’, which they use to gloss Inferno 5.39, but the addition of the canonistic gloss in Latin would be the earliest attestation of this formula:

Folgore da San Gimignano (fl. 1260), Quando la voglia segnoreggia tanto, v. 10: ‘chi sommette ragion a voluntade’

La tavola ritonda 75 (preserved in a manuscript of 1446): ‘io non voglio sottomettere la ragione alla volontà’

Meo Abbracciavacca (d. 1313), sonetto 5.3: ‘e qual sommette a voglia operazione’

Guido Cavalcanti (d. 1300), Donna me prega, v. 33: ‘ché la ’ntenzione per ragione vale’2222I have assembled this list by referring to Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, pp. 77–79.

These verses all express the juxtaposition of a rational mental faculty (ragione and operazione in Italian, mens in Latin) with an appetite of desire (volontà, intenzione, and talento in Italian, delectatio in Latin), with the syntax hinging on a verb of submission. Sin occurs when a Beginning of page[p. 197] person uses free will to subordinate the rational mind to the drive of desire. Within that purely psychological arena, consent is the threshold between virtuous refusal and culpable subjugation to delectatio, regardless of what occurs with the body. Saint Lucy, in medieval canon law, hagiography, and theology, emblematizes that power of consent to exonerate a person from guilt or complicity in violence. And she is not merely representative of that power through allegory or synecdoche: Lucy speaks in direct discourse.

In Lucy’s most famous words, she asserts that she would be rewarded for the merit of her will even if her body were forced to yield. Gratian quotes this line in the Decretum (‘Si inuitam me feceris uiolari, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam’; Dec. C. 32 q. 5), as does Thomas Aquinas, twice, in the Summa Theologiae (ST 2 2ae q. 124 a. 4 obj. 2; ST Suppl. q. 96 a. 5 repl. to obj. 4). In these foundational texts of law and theology, a woman saint’s voice rings out to state a crucial principle of consent. This role as authoritative speaker is something that the Lucy of canon law shares with the Beatrice of the Commedia, whom Barolini calls a ‘Beatrix loquax’: she is a woman who speaks with deep authority, delivering theological and ethical lessons.2323Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 303 n. 36; Barolini, ‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax’, in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 360–78. Many of the features that Lucy possesses in the textual history of canon law are, in the Commedia, refracted across other women: there are glints of bold and saintly Lucia in Beatrice’s authoritative character, and Dante addresses Lucia’s signature issues of will and compulsion with the cases of Francesca and Piccarda.

A deeper exploration of Inferno 5 and Paradiso 3–4 as they intersect with Decretum C. 32 q. 5 remains to be written. I will limit myself here to emphasizing that Lucia’s absence in Paradiso 3–4 is a very marked one. The canonistic and hagiographical Saint Lucy possesses the absolute will that Dante deems defective in Piccarda and Constance in Paradiso 3–4. Barolini writes that Dante’s choice to focus on these two women ‘casts doubt on the very category of blame-free involuntary action, by suggesting that it will always (at least when the external force is applied by human beings, with whom one can negotiate)Beginning of page[p. 198] devolve into mixed action’;2424Barolini, ‘Dante and Aristotle’, p. 268. and suggests that Dante deliberately chooses these examples to push his thinking to the extreme, so great are the ethical stakes. Piccarda and Constance were victims of violence, and their wills were also deficient in their subsequent response to that violence, and they were also saved. Dante creates this series of facts in order to isolate each conceptual element in his analysis of free will, an analysis he develops at a theological and eschatological level. His philosophical rigor sits uncomfortably with readers who would prefer not to associate victims of violence with blameworthiness in any context, for such an association between rape and blame — when applied in a human, practical, social context — has devastating consequences for victims of sexual violence. Piccarda and Constance present a problem in a way Lucy does not, because there is no room for human interpretation or doubt about Lucy’s will. In the end her body was not moved by the men who tried to take her in their power. Yet Dante pointedly does not include her in Paradiso 4 with Saint Lawrence and Gaius Mucius Scaevola, Beatrice’s male examples to illustrate that ‘così salda voglia è troppo rada’ (‘but it is all | too seldom that a will is so intact’; Par. 4.87), though Lucy’s heroic will is of the same order. Lucia’s absence in Paradiso 4 sharpens the gendered contrast between the two steadfast men and the two fragile nuns.2525Barolini, ‘Dante and Aristotle’, p. 271. Dante exploits that contrast to generate sympathy for those women, for they are flawed and humanized, unlike the distant men whose exemplary status elicits little emotional response in the reader.2626While it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss in detail, I note that Gratian, too, used a flawed and humanized example to reinforce his treatment of consent. The second pillar of his argumentation is Lucretia, who appears in C. 32 q. 5 via canons extracted from Augustine’s City of God. Lucretia is a necessary complement to Lucia, for she was actually raped. The status of her will is ambiguous and that ambiguity makes her a powerful, relatable example. Lucy is inextricably part of this canto, because it is an exploration of precisely the issues that her story raises across medieval law, hagiography, and theology, but Lucia herself is a silent presence.Beginning of page[p. 199]

~

When Dante’s Lucia appears in Inferno 2, Purgatorio 9, and Paradiso 32, she seems more a lady of lyric than a Christian saint or legal exemplum. Here is Lucia’s appearance in Inferno 2 in full:

Lucia intervenes in Inferno 2’s dramatization of doubt, as the pilgrim expresses hesitation about his potentially transgressive voyage only to have those doubts assuaged by Virgil’s reassurance that ‘tre donne benedette’ (‘three blessed ladies’) have sanctioned his voyage from on high. An unnamed ‘donna gentile’ (now generally recognized as the Virgin Mary) expresses to Lucia her concern about Dante; then Lucia moves and speaks to Beatrice; then Beatrice comes to Virgil to Beginning of page[p. 200] commission him as Dante’s guide; all of which Virgil relays to Dante in the diegesis of Inferno 2. Lucia’s actions and speech are reported within Beatrice’s extended speech to Virgil, which is in turn embedded within Virgil’s speech to Dante in Inferno 2 as an ‘autobiographical pre-history’ constructed from the Vita nuova through the Commedia.2727I am following the Commento Baroliniano here: ‘Inferno 2 thus communicates the crucial autobiographical pre-history of the Commedia: the story of how Dante learned to find consolatio in dead Beatrice. At the same time that Inferno 2 communicates the protagonist’s “true” pre-history, the canto also enacts a pre-history in its fiction, by telling of a meeting in Limbo between Beatrice and Virgilio that precedes the account of Inferno 1’ (para. 49). Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Inferno 2: Beatrix Loquax and Consolation’, Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2018) <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-2/> [accessed 3 June 2025].

Lucia, the early Christian virgin martyr who heroically resisted gang rape at a brothel, becomes a conduit between the mother of Christ and Dante’s dead Florentine beloved. Maria and Lucia both speak in the lexicon of Dante’s Vita nuova. Lucia reprises the praise paradigm by calling Beatrice ‘loda di Dio vera’, as many commentators have noted by reference to Vita nuova 26.2828Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, in her commentary to Inf. 2.103, states: ‘Questa idea è fondamentale nella Vita Nuova (see 26.1–2), alla quale il richiamo, se si uniscono a questo i due versi successivi, non potrebbe essere più preciso.’ The Vita nuova already establishes an association between Beatrice and Maria in heaven: after her death, Beatrice’s residence in paradise is ‘ove è Maria’ (‘where Mary is’).2929Beatrice’s death is described through reference to Maria as well: ‘lo segnore della giustizia chiamòe questa gentilissima a gloriare sotto la ’nsegna di quella regina benedetta virgo Maria’ (‘the Lord of Justice called his most gracious of women to glory under the banner of that blessed queen the Virgin Mary’; Vn 19). Quotations from the Vita nuova are from Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova di Dante Alighieri. Edizione critica, ed. by Michele Barbi (Florence: Bemporad e Figlio, 1932). English translation from Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, trans. by Andrew Frisardi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012). And when Maria first speaks to Lucia in Inferno 2, she calls Dante a fedele of Lucia (‘Or ha bisogno il tuo fedele | di te’; Inf. 2.98–99), using a term that also has a history in the Vita nuova. In Vita nuova 12.2, a weeping Dante secludes himself in his room after Beatrice denies him her greeting, and there he defines himself as Love’s fedele in need of help: ‘e quivi, chiamando misericordia a la donna de la cortesia, e dicendo “Amore, aiuta lo tuo fedele”, m’addormentai come un pargoletto battuto lagrimando’ (‘and there, calling on the mercy of Beginning of page[p. 201] the lady of benevolence and grace, and saying “Love, help your faithful one!” I fell asleep crying like a little boy who’d been beaten’; Vn 12.2). The reference to Dante as Lucia’s fedele in Inferno 2 has flummoxed readers because it seems to indicate a personal devotion to Lucia not attested anywhere else in Dante’s works, including elsewhere in the Commedia.3030The closest thing to a reference to Saint Lucy in Dante’s other works is a technical astronomical discourse in Convivio 3.5, where Dante will use the names ‘Lucia’ and ‘Maria’ to represent imaginary cities on the northern and southern poles of the Earth. Mary is north and Lucia is south. In the imagined geography of the Commedia, purgatory is on the south pole, and so there is a resonance between the city Lucia in the Convivio and Mount Purgatory in the Commedia; Lucia and Maria define the imagined geographical space of Convivio 3.5 as they define the imagined celestial space of heaven as recounted in Inferno 2. But the Convivio passage does not facilitate a confirmation of St. Lucy as Dante’s particular patron saint. My thanks to Louis Moffa for his insights on Lucy’s spatial function in the Convivio. The term fedele itself, though, links Lucia to both Love and Beatrice: Dante is ‘lo tuo fedele’ to Love in Vita nuova 12.2, ‘il tuo fedele’ to Lucia in Inferno 2.28, and ‘[i]l tuo fedele’ to Beatrice in Purgatorio 31.134.3131In Purgatorio 31, three ladies/nymphs/theological virtues exhort Beatrice to look at Dante: ‘“Volgi, Beatrice, volgi li occhi santi” | era la sua canzone “al tuo fedele | che, per vederti, ha mossi passi tanti!”’ (‘“Turn, Beatrice, o turn your holy eyes | upon your faithful one”, their song beseeched, | “who, that he might see you, has come so far”’; Purg. 31.133–35). Dante makes other references to the concept of being a fedele or one of a group of fedeli (in Paradiso 26.60, Dante designates himself fedele in the sense of Christian believer, and in the prose of Vita nuova 3.9 he describes A ciascun’alma as being addressed to ‘tutti li fedeli d’Amore’, ‘all of Love’s faithful’) but the references to Dante’s own fedeltà to a specific person, with a possessive adjective, are more restricted. Fidelity to Lucia, patterned on the socially established convention of personal devotion to a dead saint, mirrors Dante’s unconventional devotion to the dead Beatrice.3232The idea that Dante must remain faithful to Beatrice even after her death and not transfer his will to a new love (an ethical conflict dramatized in the Vita nuova’s episode of the donna gentile) is not at all standard in the prior lyric tradition. See Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Errancy: A Brief History of Dante’s Ferm voler’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 568–69.

Lucia’s role in Inferno 2 is one of both blessed resistance and blessed motion: Beatrice introduces Lucia as ‘nimica di ciascun crudele’ (‘enemy of every cruelty’) and Lucia’s first action is ‘si mosse’ (‘[she] moved’; Inf. 2.100–01). The first descriptor derives directly from her legend while the second is an inversion of how she is depicted in Dante’s sources. She is an enemy of all cruelty just as she is in the Legenda aurea, where she states that ‘corruptores autem mentis Beginning of page[p. 202] et corporis nunquam scivi’ (‘I have never known corrupters of mind or body’, Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’). In her martyrdom, she is famously immoveable, as she states to Paschasius: ‘aeque ut primum immobilem me videbis’ (‘you shall see me immoveable just as before’, Legenda aurea, ‘De Sancta Lucia virgine’). In Inferno 2, she is not immobile at all but defined by motion, and thus her very movement endorses the blessedness of her purpose in the afterlife, just as her immobility before Paschasius’s men endorses her integrity of will in life.

Dante’s challenge in Inferno 1–2 is precisely one of will. In Inferno 2.95, Beatrice describes the obstacle in Dante’s journey as an impedimento. Dante glosses this concept at the beginning of the Convivio, where he writes that two types of internal impediment or defect can block a man from the pursuit of knowledge and spiritual perfection:

Dentro da l’uomo possono essere due difetti e impedi[men]ti: l’uno da la parte del corpo, l’altro da la parte de l’anima. Da la parte del corpo è quando le parti sono indebitamente disposte, sì che nulla ricevere può, sì come sono sordi e muti e loro simili. Da la parte de l’anima è quando la malizia vince in essa, sì che si fa seguitatrice di viziose delettazioni, ne le quali riceve tanto inganno che per quelle ogni cosa tiene a vile.

(Within man there can be two defects and impediments: one in the body and one in the soul. On the part of the body, when the members are improperly arranged, so that the body cannot receive anything, like deafs and mutes and others like them. On the part of the soul, when malice overcomes it, so that it makes itself a follower of vicious pleasures, in which it becomes so deceived that because of them it holds everything worthless.) (Conv. 1.1.3)

As defined in the Convivio, an impediment is a defect within a person which blocks that person from proceeding along the straight path. (In the only other use of the word impedimento in the Commedia, Beatrice will explain to Dante that he is ‘privo | d’impedimento’ in Paradiso 1.139–40.) In canon law, the term impedimentum is a technical term for an obstacle that prevents a sacrament from being performed: in the case of marriage, for instance, common impediments are nonage (being under the age of consent) or consanguinity (blood relation). In the Convivio, Dante defines impediments as a perversion of the will Beginning of page[p. 203] when malice overcomes the soul, which ‘si fa seguitatrice di viziose delettazioni’ (‘makes itself a follower of vicious pleasures’). As Barolini has argued, this citation should be added to the catalogue of variants on the verse ‘la ragion sommettono al talento’ (‘they subject reason to the rule of lust’) from Inferno 5.39. In the Latin variant of the phrase attached to Gratian’s quaestio on rape, the equivalent of talento is delectatio, just like Dante’s delettazione here in Convivio 1.1.3: ‘mens per delectationem subiugatur’.3333See Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”’, pp. 5–8. The reflexive verb si fa (‘makes itself’) in the Convivio captures the same sense of voluntary self-subjugation to sin that is expressed through the verb sommettono (‘they subject’) in Inferno 5 and subiugatur (‘is made subject’) in the canonistic gloss.

After Lucia assists in the resolution of Dante’s crisis in Inferno 1–2, she will intervene again at a moment of doubt in the poem’s middle canticle. In Purgatorio 9, Dante sleeps and dreams that he is ravished by a golden eagle. Using the lexicon of raptus, he compares himself to Ganymede ‘quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro’ (‘when he | was snatched up to the high consistory’; Purg. 9.24) and describes himself being carried off and burned together with the eagle: ‘e me rapisse suso infino al foco. | Ivi parea che ella e io ardesse’ (‘it snatched me up to the fire’s orbit. | And there it seemed that the eagle and I were burning’; Purg. 9.30–31).3434See Barolini, ‘Purgatorio 9: Raptus’, Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-9/> [accessed 3 June 2025]. Raptus is a term for visionary experience. It is also a crime in Roman and canon law, often classified by Christian thinkers as a type of illicit sex or luxuria along with crimes like fornication and incest.3535Elizabeth Casteen argues: ‘the rapt female saint also conceptually mirrored and overlapped the victim of rape, as hagiographers and mystical writers drew on legal and literary conventions of raptus to describe the experience and physical manifestation of mystical rapture. Both rapture and claims of sexual violence were often doubted, and the proving of both hinged on understandings of women’s volition, physicality, and tendency to deceive and be deceived’. See Elizabeth Casteen, ‘Rape and Rapture: Violence, Ambiguity, and Raptus in Medieval Thought’, in The Sacred and the Sinister: Studies in Medieval Religion and Magic, ed. by David J. Collins (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), pp. 91–116 (p. 96). Strictly speaking, the crime of raptus is abduction without consent: it is in this sense of ‘involuntary motion’ that the term raptus can signify both sexualized abduction for the purpose of marriage Beginning of page[p. 204] and mystical abduction for the purpose of vision. Even though raptus is the etymological source of the modern term ‘rape’, its definition in medieval law does not require sexual violation. However, in both practice and theory, vis and raptus frequently went together (Gratian uses what is indisputably a rape case to set up his treatment of raptus in the Decretum, for instance, even though he judges that case not to be an abduction and treats the crime of vis elsewhere).3636Gratian treats raptus primarily in C. 36, where the case narrative describes a man who invites a woman to a banquet and then rapes her. The case narratives for C. 36 (on raptus) and C. 32 (on vis) both use the same verb, opprimere, to describe sexual violence. In Decretum C. 36: ‘finito convivio juvenis virginem oppressit’; in Decretum C. 32 ‘quemdam rogavit, ut vi uxorem opprimeret suam.’ Both vis and raptus contain sexualized violence: raptus is a movement of the body from location to location without consent and vis is a movement of the body in the same place — through forced sexual contact — without consent.

In Purgatorio 9, Dante recounts a dream of being moved by violence, a violence that acquires sexual undertones through the verb rapere and the comparison to Ganymede, whom Jupiter abducted because of his beauty. Dante wakes from his dream of raptus in fear: ‘diventa’ ismorto, | come fa l’uom che, spaventato, agghiaccia’ (‘and I went pale, as will | a man who, terrified, turns cold as ice’; Purg. 9.41–42). That fear is linked to the spectre of Ulyssean transgression when Dante compares himself to Achilles awakening on Skyros, ‘là onde poi li Greci il dipartiro’ (‘the isle the Greeks would later make him leave’; Purg. 9.39). It was the fraudulent counsels of Ulysses that convinced Achilles to leave Skyros and join the Trojan war, and so that simile aligns Dante with an Achilles seduced by Ulysses. Into these layers of violence, abduction, and transgression, Dante introduces Lucia once more. Here is her second appearance in the text of the Commedia:

As in Inferno 2, Lucia is mediated by Virgil’s narration; and as in Inferno 2, when Lucia ‘si mosse, e venne’ and then ‘disse’ (‘moved herself, and came’, then ‘said’; Inf. 2.101, 103), here too Virgil describes how a lady ‘venne […] e disse’ (‘came […] and said’; Purg. 9.55). Lucia’s presence and her blessed motion rewrite the visionary violence, desexualizing Dante’s abduction by the eagle. At the same time, Lucia is identified with the dream of violence: ‘poi ella e ’l sonno ad una se n’andaro’ (‘then she and sleep together took their leave’; Purg. 9.63). Like the eagle, Lucia picks Dante up and moves him, but she uses the lighter verb pigliare: like rapire/rapere this can mean ‘to take’, yet pigliare has no automatic connotation of violence. Lucia’s function in this moment is typically read as the intervention of allegorized grace in Dante’s journey. Purgatorio 9 — where Lucia insists on her own specific Beginning of page[p. 206] identity: ‘I’ son Lucia’ (Purg. 9.55) — is also the closest Dante comes to including his Lucia directly within a treatment of violence and will. The statement of her name is the only thing that allows identification of this donna as St. Lucy, and that name is the only thing that secures her movement of Dante as a benign transportation rather than perilous abduction. Lucia’s appearance in the ninth canto is followed by a warning about deviation in the tenth:

The ‘mal amor [che] fa parer dritta la via torta’ is a restatement of the Convivio’s ‘malizia [dell’anima] che si fa seguitatrice di viziose delettazioni’ (1.1.3). Both phrases articulate the will’s consent to sinful desire, the negative manifestation of the free-willed power of consent which St. Lucy asserts in alignment with the Holy Spirit.

In Lucia’s third and final appearance in Paradiso 32, she is the last instance of the familiar formula in which Dante’s guide points out the various souls that reside in each neighbourhood of the afterlife. We come back full circle to Inferno 2 with Bernard’s gloss on Lucia as he finishes describing the celestial rose to Dante:

Lucia sits across from Adam and next to John the Baptist. Here, Lucia is defined by reference to the events recounted in Inferno 2: ‘Lucia, che mosse la tua donna | quando chinavi, a rovinar, le ciglia’ (‘Lucia sits, she who moved your lady | when you bent your brows downward, to your ruin’; Par. 32.137–38). Dante does not write of Lucia’s saintly and unbending will; he writes of Lucia’s intervention to rescue Dante from the bending of his own will. In Paradiso 32 Lucia is marked by motion (‘che mosse la tua donna’), now a transitive motion that moved Beatrice rather than the intransitive motion by which Lucia moved herself in Inferno 2 (‘si mosse’). She is associated with visionary sleep, as she was in Purgatorio 9, where again her role was to move Dante along the path (UDC, pp. 144–47). And similarly to Purgatorio 9, the description of Lucia in Paradiso 32 comes shortly before an explicitly voiced possibility of Ulyssean transgression and deviation:

In all three moments when Lucia appears in the poem, she anchors an episode where Dante rehearses and rejects a fear of transgression. She Beginning of page[p. 208] exerts her will and sets herself in motion twice to propel Dante along his path in the Commedia. Only in Paradiso does she dwell in the holy immobility for which she was remembered as a martyr and a saint.

Beyond the world of the Commedia, Lucy is recognized in other medieval texts for her powerful words of defiance which assert the force of her consent — and claim a radical inheritance in the afterlife. As Gratian and Aquinas both quote in direct discourse, Lucy defies Paschasius to say that ‘si inuitam me feceris uiolari, castitas michi duplicabitur ad coronam’, and it is this citation that enshrines Lucy as a saint of unbending will in the Decretum (C. 32 q. 5). In the Commedia, Dante reorganizes the historically-attested Lucy by translating the ethical and conceptual issues of her passio to other women and adding a lyric and personal dimension to this established saint, associating her more with Beatrice than with Piccarda (a woman who serves a similar narrative purpose for Dante as Lucy serves for Gratian). Lucia in the Commedia is an outspoken woman saint translated into a lyric key, and her multifaceted presence in Dante’s poem reinforces the authority of Beatrice, who is the inverse: a lyric lady who becomes a divine female authority. In trying to determine why Dante calls himself fedele of Lucia, readers have found only scant crumbs of evidence in Dante’s biography for his personal devotion to her. In the Commedia, it is the other way around: Dante’s active reworking of Lucy and her legend creates a Lucia — and a Beatrice — worthy of his poetic and theological devotion.